Plug-and-play managed agent harnesses in your product: Codex, Claude Code and Hermes through one API on your infrastructure, now open sourced under Apache 2.0. Switch harnesses without rebuilding your backend. Sessions, streaming, files, artifacts, cancellation, failure recovery, all handled. Model provider keys, state, and deliveries under your control. Gateway, Runner, Console in one Docker container. Ready-to-use starter kit apps as inspiration of possibilities.
Today we're launching HarnessRouter Community Edition. Think of us as OpenRouter, but for agent harnesses instead of models.
We built HarnessRouter because we used to rebuild the same backend every time we need an agent runtime behind a product. We used to build our own harness with LangGraph, agent SDK, pydantic, etc, just to find out our self-built harness performance is hard to compete with Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, etc. Once we switched our infra to leverage off-the-shelf harnesses instead of rebuilding, our agent feature delivery time is shortened from weeks to hours, and the agent quality is dramatically better. We want to advocate the same mindset to the builder community.
HarnessRouter Community Edition puts Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes behind a single API: sessions, streaming, files, artifacts, cancellation, and all the failure handling nobody enjoys writing. Pull and start with one Docker container. Your credentials, state, and files never leave your infrastructure.
In addition to the product itself, we are also publishing Unified Harness Protocol. The Unified Harness Protocol standardizes how an application talks to an agent harness. The protocol covers harness selection and configuration, task execution, streaming events, sessions, file management, cancellation, error handling, and result delivery.
One more thing: harness agents are good at far more than coding. We're shipping open source starter kits across a bunch of agentic use cases (PPT building, Spreadsheet creating, BI/Dashboard creating, Video editing, etc). The use cases we're most curious about are the ones we haven't thought of.
We would love to learn two things from ProductHunt community:
Which harness should we support next?
Where does the abstraction leak for what you're building?
Awesome launch! Taming failure recovery, streaming, and session state across different harnesses into a single protocol is top-tier work. Rooting for you @renchu_song from the agent space!
Hi Richard. You mentioned delivery going from weeks to hours once you stopped building your own harness. What was the first thing you shipped that made that obvious?
the composability answers above cover most of what I'd ask, so a narrower one: Codex, Claude Code and Hermes each have harness-specific stuff that isn't just an implementation detail - things like Claude Code's permission/tool-approval flow or subagent delegation. when a task gets routed to whichever harness actually supports that, does UHP give the calling app a way to detect "this harness can do X" and branch on it, or does building against the common surface mean you're implicitly limited to whatever the weakest supported harness can do
Since its opensource. Its meant to be forked and customized I suppose? And since its a composition product, a product with many parts, how composable is it? how easy is it to swap out parts of the system for my own when I want to change things etc? Recently DeepSeek launched their harness as opensource. 100k stars in 2 days etc. And the code was modeled on a composable plugin architecture of sorts ref https://github.com/cordiverse/paper what are your thoughts around this? Thanks!
@kuanzema Apache 2.0 is the right call, too many recent "open source" launches are really source available with strings attached. If the Community Edition and Cloud truly share the same API contract, the upgrade path is a choice and not a trap. That's how it should work.
About HarnessRouter Community Edition on Product Hunt
“Open-source unified interface for agent harnesses”
HarnessRouter Community Edition launched on Product Hunt on August 16th, 2026 and earned 221 upvotes and 26 comments, earning #3 Product of the Day. Plug-and-play managed agent harnesses in your product: Codex, Claude Code and Hermes through one API on your infrastructure, now open sourced under Apache 2.0. Switch harnesses without rebuilding your backend. Sessions, streaming, files, artifacts, cancellation, failure recovery, all handled. Model provider keys, state, and deliveries under your control. Gateway, Runner, Console in one Docker container. Ready-to-use starter kit apps as inspiration of possibilities.
HarnessRouter Community Edition was featured in API (98.5k followers), Developer Tools (517.6k followers), Artificial Intelligence (476.1k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 232.1k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted HarnessRouter Community Edition?
HarnessRouter Community Edition was hunted by Garry Tan. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Reviews
HarnessRouter Community Edition has received 1 review on Product Hunt with an average rating of 5.00/5. Read all reviews on Product Hunt.
Want to see how HarnessRouter Community Edition stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Garry Tan
Hey Product Hunt 👋
Today we're launching HarnessRouter Community Edition. Think of us as OpenRouter, but for agent harnesses instead of models.
We built HarnessRouter because we used to rebuild the same backend every time we need an agent runtime behind a product. We used to build our own harness with LangGraph, agent SDK, pydantic, etc, just to find out our self-built harness performance is hard to compete with Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, etc. Once we switched our infra to leverage off-the-shelf harnesses instead of rebuilding, our agent feature delivery time is shortened from weeks to hours, and the agent quality is dramatically better. We want to advocate the same mindset to the builder community.
HarnessRouter Community Edition puts Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes behind a single API: sessions, streaming, files, artifacts, cancellation, and all the failure handling nobody enjoys writing. Pull and start with one Docker container. Your credentials, state, and files never leave your infrastructure.
In addition to the product itself, we are also publishing Unified Harness Protocol. The Unified Harness Protocol standardizes how an application talks to an agent harness. The protocol covers harness selection and configuration, task execution, streaming events, sessions, file management, cancellation, error handling, and result delivery.
One more thing: harness agents are good at far more than coding. We're shipping open source starter kits across a bunch of agentic use cases (PPT building, Spreadsheet creating, BI/Dashboard creating, Video editing, etc). The use cases we're most curious about are the ones we haven't thought of.
We would love to learn two things from ProductHunt community:
Which harness should we support next?
Where does the abstraction leak for what you're building?
We're around all day.